Way overdue and way too long
This may take you two months to read.
Hiya, Stranger!
I have been trying to write to you for almost two months now, but my Substack has been on the fritz. I have no idea what happened, but each time I have edited a draft, it automatically refreshed the page I was working on and deleted half of what I’d written.
This happened before and then self-resolved just like this time, but that was only for about two weeks. I’m actually not sure that it’s totally solved, but I have been able to edit this particular draft for several ongoing moments, so I am hopeful that I can actually send this!
It’s quite strange and I’ve otherwise been very happy writing on this platform. My sincere apologies for my absence, especially to those of you who are paying subscribers.
I’ve had to scrap a lot of the things that I’d started to write because they were no longer relevant—some great Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, announcements about December or the holidays, newsworthy tidbits of health-related things that Congress was considering, and even some year-end reflections.
Personal Update
Since I last wrote, I have lived a goodly amount of life.
I took an adventure to Sweden with my mom and my children—a slightly different trip than we were planning.
We then attended a beautiful family retreat here in Raleigh.
Then I hired an Office Manager—a truly enormous feat.
My beloved—in the deepest sense of that word—cat Peter James, passed at age 19.
I got a four-day fever and a subsequent deep chest cough.
I’d like to expand upon each of those items because that’s helpful for me as a human but also because apparently it’s nice for people to keep up with what I’m up to, especially since I’ve been gone from your inbox for such a while. Since I don’t expect you’ll read this in one sitting, I’ve kept headlines in this one so you can take breaks!
Journey to Sweden
Beginning with #1. I taught in Stockholm, Sweden, in November. I had thought I was teaching on Saturday and Sunday, but found out the day before leaving that I was actually teaching on Friday and Saturday. That was a slightly stressful realization.
The morning of my departure, I had to pay $850 to change my ticket to get to Stockholm on Thursday instead of Friday. I had planned a stopover in Iceland for the day with my mom and sons. At that rate, I opted to not also change their tickets, so my kids’ first international trip was without either of their parents.
This meant that we needed to re-pack bags after I got home from seeing patients, but I felt at peace with what we’d decided. That was, until the customs agent in Iceland asked if I had written permission from my children’s other parent for them to leave the country without him (I did not). She informed me that next year, I would need my husband’s written permission for my children to enter a foreign country without both he and I present.
My first thought was mostly of panic, but my second thought was that would be easy to create a fraudulent version of this (is it terrible that this was my second thought?).
It nonetheless scared the crap out of me, so I wrote out my permission slip for the boys to travel with my mom the next day without me present, and my husband emailed the same.
I then sprinted the rest of the way through the airport, hugged my children tightly, and left them in a foreign country (with their grandmother, but it still felt pretty dramatic at the time). The stressful situation continued when their flight ended up getting canceled and they didn’t arrive until almost 11pm on Friday, about 12 hours later than scheduled, but I breathed a sigh of relief when they showed up at the hotel with my mom.
Teaching in Sweden was lovely: the people were so kind and receptive, and truly a joy to be around. I’m incredibly grateful and still a little awestruck that I have gotten to teach chiropractors internationally. It really is an honor, and it’s been so fun to explore other cultures through the lens of chiropractic. During this trip specifically, I also got to participate in Swedish fika (FEE-kuh) multiple times.
Fika
Fika is the Swedish tradition of a true coffee break and a sweet treat. This isn’t a to-go cup of coffee that you slurp whilst also doing something else and cramming a pastry in your mouth: it was an actual time of pause in the day where we would chat and enjoy the coffee and the treat (and they were kind enough to have gluten-free, dairy-free treats for me at each fika).
We explored Stockholm after I was done teaching, and truly enjoyed our trip, though it looked very dissimilar to what I’d originally intended. The sun began setting around 3:30pm each day, which was quite strange (and made afternoon fika seem necessary!).
We got back without any hiccups in the itinerary except my mom’s lost luggage (which she now has), recovered from our jet lag for the most part, and attended the Family Rising Retreat.
Family Rising Retreat
I got to participate in and help facilitate an aspect of the Family Rising Retreat that our friends, the Phoenix family, put on. Our whole family got to participate in establishing deep and intentional connection with ourselves and each other, and shared space with many other families who were choosing to do the same.
I had the honor of introducing the group to a movement sequence of their entire first year of life, which I’ve had the opportunity to study extensively through DNS. My husband prepared a large part of the dinner, and I got to bless the food.
When they offer the next Family Rising event, I will be sure to share with you because it isn’t one you’ll want to miss!
Finally Hired an OM!
After two years of just hodge-podging (that’s not a word) together a management system for running my multidisciplinary wellness center, I finally hired an Office Manager.
After Mary was killed, I didn’t have the capacity to hire. I was too busy trying to figure out my next literal and figurative step that I couldn’t set aside the time needed to establish a playbook for hiring someone to run my Back Office, let alone wrap my head around bringing in a person to sit in Mary’s literal and figurative seat.
So I didn’t.
I grieved, led my team as best I could, managed the day-to-day functions of the office, treated patients with the highest quality care I could, leaned on my team to help keep things running and promoted internally for the workload, and said goodbye to several employees who found new paths forward in the aftermath of a coworker and friend being murdered.
I worked every single day (including weekends) except Christmas Day from October 14, 2022 (the day after Mary was killed) through a random Friday in July of 2023. I worked because I felt I had to: I had no idea how to untangle all of the aspects of work that Mary had left undone while simultaneously untangling my practice from the (very deep and infiltrating) tentacles of insurance, which had gone from “planned future exit” to immediate necessity since Mary was the one who’d managed all of the insurance nonsense.
During that time, I also had a deadline to finish my book, several new presentations for conferences and seminars that I needed to create slide decks for, and my regular workload of seeing patients and being the owner of my practice.
So I worked every single day.
And it wore on me. Significantly.
I didn’t realize how much it was wearing on me until my husband asked me if I’d want to go to the beach for the day on a random Friday in July. I desperately wanted and needed to do that. My heart was still aching from Mary’s loss, and I was drowning myself in work.
I wondered if I could bring my laptop and get some work done on the drive there, which was when it occurred to me that I was in way over my head. I told him I absolutely wanted to take a day trip to the beach and that I would be leaving my laptop at home and wouldn’t even think of using my cell phone for work.
The next week, I got an auto-response from an LMNT employee telling me that she was on a “Rest Week” in their 3:1 work:rest ratio and I essentially started salivating at the idea that I could force myself to rest for a week each month instead of once every nine months for a day.
I realized I was the only person who was choosing for me to work this much and that I would be the only person who could come to my own rescue. I put a plan in place to establish this as my new work schedule starting in October. But I had a new associate and I was really concerned that it wouldn’t be fair for me to have that time off and for him to not. So I decided we’d both start this in October, which—as hindsight often allows—was a terrible idea.
But I had a whole plan on how it could work, with us alternating our Rest Weeks so that a doctor was always available.
We both ended up taking a Rest Week each month for four months, which from a numbers perspective tanked my practice. Literally anyone could have seen that coming, but I suppose the alternative of me truly burning out would have been worse, and those times spent in forced relaxation truly revived me.
We now see patients every week like a reasonable healthcare clinic. But I am mindful of taking intentional breaks, of walking away from the computer, of leaving work until the next day. I still don’t feel like I have my schedule entirely figured out, but I do have a handle on things.
Side note: I had no idea I was going to write about all of that. I was really just planning to giving the Cliff’s Notes version of hiring a new OM, which I haven’t even done yet.
As I was going through my own journey of figuring out how to work in a way that was reasonable, I knew I needed extra help. About a year after Mary was killed, I had done enough grieving and healing to feel like I was emotionally ready to hire.
I also knew that the makeshift way that I’d established things in Mary’s absence wasn’t ideal; for that reason, I wanted to hire someone completely new to me. I have previously hired mostly from within my known network: people I know or people who know people that I know.
But I needed an outside pair of eyes and a brain that could offer fresh perspectives. I tried three separate rounds of hiring—job posting, application reviewing, candidate interviews—and came up short each time.
The process was honestly draining and each interview brought up bittersweet memories when I was asked why the role was vacant.
But I finally did one more round of job postings with ApplicantPro in November, which meant I paid to have my posting on multiple different job sites, and ended up with multiple great candidates by fishing in a much larger pond. I hired Ginger, who’s been steadily getting her feet under her and whom I am excited to help bring in the next fantastic chapter in the story of TriangleCRC.
Peter James
I’m not going to say a ton about Peter here because this newsletter is quite long, but I do want to introduce you to him. He was my first indoor pet. I grew up on a farm, so I always had all sorts of animals around, but none of them lived inside until I was a sophomore in college and my roommate and I decided that we needed a cat. We had a fish, but that wasn’t cutting it for either of us, who were both from a very small town with lots of animals always around.
I told my parents our idea and learned (because apparently my parents also didn’t care about my dorm room rules) that my friend Katie’s parents’ barn cat had recently had kittens. They were about two months old, and if I wanted one, I was free to go and pick one.
I selected the one I thought was the cutest and drove with him the just-over 60 minutes from my hometown to my dorm room, where I sneaked him and his newly-purchased litter box up four flights of stairs to avoid anyone on the elevator.
We named him PJ for no reason other than liking the combination of those letters together. It wasn’t until I met my future husband two years later that he commented that “PJ isn’t a name, it’s just initials. His name is probably Peter James,” which somehow stuck and he henceforth was known as Peter or Peter James.
Because Peter started his adolescence as a cat in a dorm room, he had no way of being aloof like most cats: there was nowhere to hide. Any time someone came into our dorm room, he eventually learned to greet them because they would inevitably give him a treat and scratch behind his ears.
He also had the smothering love of a 19-year-old young lady who insisted on holding him in an upside-down cradle like an infant and that he cuddle each night. He continued to prefer this method of holding and learned to sleep under the blankets (with only his head sticking out) with me each night and continued to do so throughout his life.
We, of course, were discovered in our rule-breaking, but our floor’s RA was so happy to get occasional kitten snuggles that she never reported us.
Peter moved with me multiple times and in his 19 years, lived in 14 different places. He was with me for half of my life, most of his, and the totality of each of my son’s lives: a constant companion through life’s challenges and changes, a friendly face, and an incessant bundle of love.
He passed peacefully at home and broke my heart by having the nerve to leave me.
Fever
Two days after Peter passed, I started to develop some dull body aches. I then went on to develop a fever that persisted for four days (making me miss two full days of patient care) and then got a terribly deep chest cough. I skipped the persistent head congestion that most people who have been sick recently experienced, but went straight from fever and body aches to a chest cold with coughs so violent they caused me to develop pelvic floor dysfunction.
Yes, I coughed so hard I actually peed myself on two occasions, which, as I hope you know, is perfectly unreasonable. Gratefully, I know a thing or two about how to rehab a pelvic floor and used my own advice to recover. I have returned to normal status of being a fully potty-trained adult.
In the middle of all of that, we celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year. We celebrated with old traditions and brought about some new ones*. And now I’m ready for a joy-filled adventure of 2025, starting with finally getting a newsletter into your inbox!
Here we go!
Pregnancy
A few things to note on movement during pregnancy that I think are worth sharing: movement is life and if you’re carrying an extra life around, you need movement. A lot of pregnant women are afraid of movement because they are afraid it will cause them pain (kinesiophobia), but a 2024 study in the Journal of Back and Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation showed that:
Low back pain in pregnant women has a higher frequency than in the normal population, regardless of age, gestational week, and gravida. Obesity appears to be a risk factor for LBP and increases disability. Kinesiophobia in pregnant women is significantly associated with obesity and disability. Unless there are contraindications, a physically active pregnancy process and regular exercise should be recommend[ed].
Essentially, movement during pregnancy actually decreases the risks of having more pain. This is also why chiropractic care is so helpful during pregnancy and why I end up teaching so many courses to chiropractors on how to take care of pregnant women: they need us because they need to be able to move pain-free!
Youth Athletes and Concussion
You know who else needs a chiropractor? Athletes. Especially youth athletes.
A recent study published last month in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport regarding youth athletes stated:
Players who sustained a concussion during the season had weaker neck extension strength. Players with a flexor to extensor strength ratio above 0.74 were 3-times more likely to sustain a concussion.
Granted, a direct blow to the head can still cause a concussion regardless of neck strength (ask me how I know), but it doesn’t hurt to stop having terrible text neck. (I even mention how important upright posture is for appropriate pelvic floor function in my book.)
An easy activation of the muscles that can help strengthen the front of the neck, relief neck tension and improve posture? Here’s Baby Doctor Mumma from 12 years ago to show you how to do this exercise.
If you have a youth athlete, please take them to a chiropractor. If you’re in Raleigh, we’d love to help them. If you’re not, find a great doc here.
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
I had been writing about this for quite a while, but now I’ll just summarize it quickly. All business owners were to file their BOI (Beneficial Ownership Information with FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network). The purpose? Business owners file their personal information so that FinCEN has a database that they can:
share widely with other agencies and even internationally to facilitate federal investigations and prosecutions.
Let’s get this straight: if you haven’t committed a crime, you should add your name to this database in case you potentially do commit a crime in the future, because then the government will have your information on file so they can prosecute you. Seems reasonable, eh?
But a preliminary injunction was filed, meaning that the need to file was temporarily on hold. And then two days before Christmas, the AAPS reported that a “a motions panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit just rendered an unpublished order that reinstates the terrible FinCEN reporting obligation for nearly 33 million Americans.”
However, the BOI e-filing website still states clearly:
BOI e-Filing Alert: Please note that beneficial ownership information reporting requirements have been affected by a recent federal court order. The Department of the Treasury is appealing that order. In the meantime, reporting companies are not currently required to file a BOIR and are not subject to liability if they fail to do so while the applicable order remains in force.
However, reporting companies may still opt to file a BOIR.
You can guess whether or not I voluntarily filed this nonsense form.
So why do business owners need to file this form?
The reasoning by the appellate court in its unpublished opinion included its statement that "a last-minute nationwide preliminary injunction would undermine our ability to push other countries to reform their" laws.
Makes sense. (No it doesn’t.)
Glyphosate
I just thought you should know that glyphosate (the herbicide which was patented as an antibiotic and people wonder why chronic diseases are so prevalent when they eat antibiotics for breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner, but I digress) has been linked to accelerated Alzheimer’s disease:
Researchers found that glyphosate exposure even at regulated levels was associated with increased neuroinflammation and accelerated AD-like pathology in mice — an effect that persisted 6 months after a recovery period when exposure was stopped.
Color me surprised. Just kidding. That’s not surprising at all. Nor is the next one.
RSV
Here’s a super fun “didn’t see this one coming (unless you were paying any amount of attention to how these things have gone in the past four years)” moment: in a research study of infants aged 5-8 months who received an mRNA RSV vaccine, 12.5% developed severe RSV compared to 5% in the placebo group.
So if a baby got the RSV mRNA vaccine, they were more likely to develop severe RSV than if they didn’t get the vaccine. That tracks. Don’t be fooled by the headline of that article, which states that “RSV Vaccine in Infants May Proceed With Caution”.
In case you were wondering, they’re not scrapping the mRNA technology, even though the litany of side effects of the covid experiment are still being uncovered. Unlike with the covid shots, they are actually still studying those who were enrolled in these original experiments, so at least there’s that.
Daniel Penny
In early December, Daniel Penny was found “not guilty” in the NYC case against him. Whether you followed the case or not, the bad cat shared some really interesting perspectives on castle law and stand your ground laws:
Okay, finally, my friend Sam shared this with me, and I also thought it was worth sharing because so many people are concerned with osteoporosis and are sold drugs on the premise that their bones need to be strengthened with these drugs. But what’s really behind all of that?
Talk soon (hopefully!),
L
And now just a little extra for paid subscribers.
*As a thanks for your patronage, I’ve included a little bonus for those of you who are paying subscribers. It’s nothing incredibly newsworthy, but I’ve made a new friend from Germany and she’s introduced me to a holiday tradition that my family has chosen to adopt, and I’ll share about it below the paywall.